An Examination of the Failure Rate and Content Equivalency of Electronic Surrogates and the Implications for Print Equivalent Preservation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective – This study sought to determine whether evidence indicates a need to preserve print equivalent journal collections. In addition, this research aimed to provide data on the failure rate of print equivalent materials for possible digitization to replace existing poor quality or defective electronic surrogates.
 
 Methods – The project compared the content of randomly selected journal titles, volumes, and issues from seven electronic journal archives and their print equivalents held at the University of Saskatchewan Library. The archives were obtained from five separate vendors representing humanities, social sciences, science, technology, and medicine. Data were collected on the frequency and types of failure of electronic surrogates, supplemental content missing from electronic surrogates, and frequency and types of failure of print equivalent materials.
 
 Results – Across all electronic journal archives the failure rate of electronic surrogates was 7.5% for all PDF documents and 11.5% for scholarly PDF documents. For individual electronic journal archives the failure rate ranged from 0.7% to 19.5% for all PDF documents and from 0.3% to 26.5% for scholarly PDF documents. Data is presented on the failure rate of individual electronic journal archives, types of failure, and missing supplemental content. An examination of print equivalent titles found 1.7% of print scholarly articles could not be used or were not optimal for digitization. 
 
 Conclusions – The study demonstrates the need for preserving print equivalent journal titles for at least the short (less than 5 years) to medium term (up to 10 years), while poorly digitized materials are identified, replaced, and digitally preserved. While electronic surrogates of image-rich scholarly papers are more likely to have quality issues, the study found some text-only PDF scholarly documents were illegible, indicating the need for caution against liberally applying this as a criterion for disposal of print equivalent titles. There is significant supplemental content absent from electronic surrogates which indicates a need for further discussion of the necessity for such information or for incorporating it into the digitization process to ensure a complete record of the print equivalent journals for future use. The failure rate of print equivalent titles for possible digitization provides additional data for discussions related to the determination of optimal overlap. It also suggests that the number of copies required for a full set of preserved journals over a specified time horizon may be greater than anticipated, unless page level validation is performed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.045 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".